The Student Union Board of Governors (SUBOG) has officially released the list of artists performing at this year’s UConnic music festival, announcing rapper Swae Lee as the event’s headliner.
Held annually in April, UConnic has become a modern tradition for University of Connecticut students, granting the unique experience of attending a large concert on the Storrs campus. This year’s show will take place on Thursday, April 11 at 6:00 p.m. in Gampel Pavilion. For UConnic 2024, organizers are emphasizing UConn’s distinct identity as the key framework for the festival.
“This year there was a focus on developing UCONNIC as a brand rather than putting on a visiting artist’s concert presented by SUBOG,” said SUBOG Concert Chair Allegra Mendiratta. “The lineup we curated for this year has varying genres of artists with different backgrounds to reach as many students as possible.”
SUBOG released multiple ballots this past fall to voice student input on artist selection, eliciting a sizable response from the UConn community.
“We want students to know their opinions were very heavily weighed in our decision-making which is why we released the two surveys at the beginning of the fall semester,” said Mendiratta. “The initial one, posted to the SUBOG Instagram, was used to gauge what music students were interested in having at UConn. On the UCONNIC Instagram, we conducted another questionnaire, which garnered a lot more traction and focused more heavily on different possible artists. The second survey received 3,000 responses and did in fact have Swae Lee on the ballot, who was voted as a top choice.”
Despite efforts to incorporate student attitudes in the artist selection process, not everyone is content with the choice of headliner Swae Lee. Countless comments beneath UConnic’s Instagram reveal post express their disappointment in SUBOG’s decision, many of which received over a hundred likes.
“As an artist, Swae Lee is mostly known for his feature work on choruses, so to make him a headliner without anybody he does these features for – he isn’t going to garner massive attention from the audience,” said second-semester student Antoine Chisholm.
Chisholm is WHUS Radio’s assistant live production director and the DJ of WHUS Radio show ‘Monke Brains.’
“I believe UConnic should have tempered the expectations of the student body. If they couldn’t afford massive artists they should have prepared us for a more lowkey artist like Swae Lee,” Chisholm said.
Though SUBOG understands that some students have concerns regarding the upcoming festival, they are steadfast in their excitement about the event’s promising turnout.
“The team behind UCONNIC has put in a lot of hard work and dedication to create a great show for the UConn community,” Mendiratta said.This task, though seemingly easy to the public eye, has been a long, arduous journey filled with many difficult decisions … While public reception to this year’s headliner was not as positive as we hoped, we believe the show is going to be one to remember and every artist is going to put on a great performance.”
Tickets to UConnic 2024 are available for purchase on the SUBOG website.